How Are Psychedelics and Other Party Drugs Changing Psychiatry?

Podcast sheds light on how CBD and other drugs can help mental illness

A recent episode of the Freakonomics Podcast discussed ketamine, MDMA and CBD

Three leading researchers from the Mount Sinai Health System discuss how ketamine, cannabis, and ecstasy are being used (or studied) to treat everything from severe depression to addiction to PTSD. The episode discusses the upsides, downsides, and regulatory puzzles.

Three medical researchers talk about how a variety of drugs often used for recreational purposes that are increasingly being used in medical settings. It is a topic of great interest these days — one example being Michael Pollan’s best-selling book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. The substances are ketamine, MDMA, and CBD.

The discussion on CBD includes comments from Dr Yasmin Hurd, Director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai -

And one day I said, “Let’s at least look at another cannabinoid in the cannabis plant.” And we started looking at cannabidiol, CBD. And there we actually saw an opposite effect. We saw that it actually reduced heroin-seeking behavior in the rat model. And then we started thinking, “Wow! Could this potentially work for our human subjects?” And started doing clinical trials. That was actually over 10 years ago, before CBD became so popular.

You can listen to the podcast below or read the entire transcript.